And that, Toto, is how I got to be the man I am today: hard work and determination and an alien machine that flayed me alive so I could be the best that I could be.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I MEAN: YES…
I mean, okay, confession time, I am overdoing the naïve and tragic monster here. I am not Hercules at home with the family, after all, and while the Mother Machine might have made me Herculean, it didn’t drive me quite so obliviously mad as that. I could make a lot of excuses: I’ve not been well, it was an off day, haven’t been sleeping, all that, but I can’t fool myself and I can’t fool you, Toto. I can’t really pretend that I just went off after the rest of the goblins without putting two and two together.
I’m going to keep calling them goblins, because one thing human ingenuity is good at is an infinite capacity for self-delusion.
I sense I’m losing audience sympathy, Toto. After all, surely I’m meant to have that big scene now where I hold up those name tags in my bloody hands and scream at the gods for tricking me. I mean, this is grade-A anagnorisis territory, as much as if I’d killed my father and married the Mother Machine. Howl, howl, howl! as the man says. And somewhere a masked chorus sings about reaching too far, tragic flaws and hubris.
But really, hubris? Me? Gary Rendell from Stevenage? Not exactly Prometheus, am I? I never stole anything from the gods. They turned up like Greeks, arms full of gifts and wanting to know how they could help. I can’t be blamed, can I, for saying I wanted to get back to the others, to go home? And so it becomes a little more Monkey’s Paw than Homeric ode. I made a perfectly well-meaning wish and there were unintended consequences. Mistakes were made, but innocent ones. I’m not at fault. Don’t blame me.
And I still hear them, that irresistible mental thread that cuts through my brain like fishing line and draws me towards them. It hurts, that tug. It won’t let me rest. Scritch, scritch, scritch all the time inside my skull as their thoughts bombard me like particles in an accelerator.
There’s a pack of them just round the corner, I realise. I can hear them clatter and rattle with their tools and devices, but more than that I can hear their buzzsaw minds flaring with fear. And I should go, I know I should. I should be the noble savage and return to my land so as not to corrupt the civilized visitors with my mores. I mean, I can dress it up as diplomacy as much as I want but I’m covered in the blood of Carswell P and Proshkin M,
which would probably count as a faux pas at most diplomatic functions. Should I hold out my arms for a hug to show this modern Prometheus just wants to be loved?
And, oh, the fear! The frenetic squabbling panic of them as they try to get their gear packed up before I arrive, except I’m just round the next corner, listening. That fear, the keenest, scritchiest cicada-call of them all, except now my body reacts a bit differently. Now my body has had a taste of that fear, and the soft, easily-digestible tissues that house it. My stomach growls a demand of its own and my salivary glands are working overtime. If they didn’t want to be eaten, they shouldn’t be so delicious.
I make a last lunge for dignity. I am Gary Rendell, astronaut. I was born on Earth too many decades ago. I was lost from the Expedition Team too many months or weeks or centuries ago. I will wave my humanity like a flag, drape myself in it. I will beg forgiveness from the goblins. And I only ate two of them.
And so I round the corner. I want to stand straight like Washington crossing the Delaware, but somehow the corridors are too cramped for that, forcing me to maintain my bestial stoop, my shoulders brushing the ceiling. I hold up a hand: Hi, kids, minotaur-in-training here, how’s that maze working out for you?
There are five of them here, and they’ve been stripping something from the walls, metal strips some previous travellers laid down. There are lights here, like watery cats-eyes, but most of them are dead because the goblins are vandals and are taking away the machinery that powered them, like scrap dealers going down the street for any old iron. Don’t they realise how precious these little islands of light are? Ghastly little destructive creatures.
But still, I keep one hand up in friendship. “Hey, there!” I tell them brightly. “Now, I know this looks bad…”
One of them has a cutting torch, and he takes advantage of my loquaciousness to go for me with it. The name on his badge is Li L and some characters I don’t know, which suggests the Chinese crew contingent ended up on the Expedition Team whether they wanted to or not. Li L is definitely going for it with that cutter, though, and my hand of friendship ends up with a big old burn across the palm, which doesn’t hurt anywhere as much as I thought it would. One of the others is backing him up with a gun, an actual honest-to-goodness chemical propellant firearm, and apparently it’s monster season because they let me have it with the entire magazine over Li L’s shoulder.
I feel the impacts like the punches of the Iron Hunchback (and what happened to that guy?) and I’ll have a nice tight clump of bruises in the morning, but my skin appears to be proof against close-range small arms fire now, which is an interesting development. The others have run, and they’re hauling a trolley of scrap after them, apparently important enough that they’ll risk their lives for it. But then metal’s scarce in the Crypts. You want building material, you’ve got stone, stone or stone.
And now Li L’s jabbed me in the gut with the cutter while I let my mind wander. I don’t think this diplomacy thing is working. Behind him, Diaz J apparently forgot to come out with a second clip, and so ze’s got a crowbar and aren’t we a pair of determined tomb raiders then, eh? But they want a fight, and they want to cover for their friends, and that seems all very dulce et decorum est, so I’ll play my role, snarling and swiping at them until their friends are far enough I can barely see their lamp-glow. I think they know they’re screwed, by then. The burns are only skin deep and not slowing me down, and Diaz J can’t put more force into a crowbar swing than ze did with hir bullets.
So I step back, spreading my hands in a shrug what-you-gonna-do? sort of a gesture, as best I can in the limited space, and grin at them, because they’re bloody game, I can tell you. I appreciate that.
I kill Li L first because he won’t get out of my face with that cutter, and between you and me it is starting to sting. I just close a hand around his weapon and his arms and clench them all into one pulpy mass with my best power handshake. Diaz J hits me in the eye then, right with the hooked part of the crowbar, and that hurts like buggery. I slam Li L down into the floor and just straight-arm Diaz in the chest, powering hir twenty feet straight backwards until ze hits a wall. That’s not enough, apparently, because ze’s trying to get up when I reach hir, though probably concussed and with severe internal organ damage. I put hir out of hir misery with another solid slap and briefly consider going after the others. Not like I wouldn’t catch up with them pretty sharpish. My stomach growls, though, and it would be a shame to charge off and have some revolting scavenger eat these delicious meats. And it feels disrespectful to Li’s and Diaz’s courage to go after the others right away. It’s not as though I won’t be able to find them when I’m done here. No, I’ll respect their bravery, and also their generous contribution to my diet.
I sit down and tuck in. Bon appetit.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SO AFTER BEING stripped down and remade by the Mother Machine, I – actually, you know the rest of it, Toto. I mean there’s more, obviously; there’s detail and circumstance, but is any of it really important? The scale of the Crypts renders us all meaningless, so does it matter precisely where I went, what obstacles I cleared, what strange faces and non-faces I met? You can pretty much construct it from all the usual snippets: seen things you people wouldn’t believe, boldy gone, sought out strange new worlds, galaxy far, far away, trying to find a way home. I am the most travelled human being in the history of the species. I have met aliens beyond your imagination – no forehead ridges or Halloween costume masks here, but hot and cold running aliens in every corner of this convoluted place. Some o
f them were going about business as usual, having tamed a corner of the Crypts to suit them, walking to other worlds like the Makers intended. Others were lost, like me. And I ate hardly any of them, Toto; only the ones like Clive who were dead already. It’s only since the scritchy started that my temper’s gone sour and I’ve started picking fights. I’m a man more sinned against than sinning.
And yes, the scritchy is my fault, in the end. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Monkey’s Paw surely put a finger in my eye when I wished to find my folks again. What else is it that’s letting me home in on them but the changes Mother made? And it’s not my fault they make me so angry, with their constant jabber and chatter. It’s not my fault I’m strong now, and they can’t stop me.
I’m sensing a certain criticism from you, Toto, but you’d have done the same in my position. You’re a figment of my imagination, after all. Of course you would.
But enough of the backstory. I carried you from Madrid and the launch of Kaveney all the way to the Mother Machine, the story of how I was made and remade. It’s time to bring things to a conclusion. That whispery whine in my head is still there, and although it’s far away, I know it’s the rest of them, all of them that made it into the Crypts, all those rescue parties and expeditions and scientists. I wonder who they even left on the Quixote. And what that skeleton crew did, when the Crypts finally swallowed everyone. Or perhaps most of them are still on the ship, already on their way home, and I’m only homing in on a few luckless castaways. I mean, that would be narratively more satisfying, wouldn’t it? Not from my perspective, not from those luckless sods left behind, but for those on the ship, they’d feel a real sense of achievement. They’d get the requisite sadness about those who couldn’t make it combined with the satisfaction of making it home to tell the tale. But at heart, I know, wherever they get back to, it won’t be home. Not the same river, not the same man, right?
I make my approach a leisurely one. I want to give the runners time to tell tales of the return of Gary Rendell, back from the dead, come to tell you all – I shall tell you all… what? Like the man in the poem, I’m lost for words, and not only because my means of communication has become steadily more monstrous. What, really, could I tell you? What moral lesson has all this suffering taught me? Don’t go into the Crypts? The universe is full of aliens just as dumb as you? Astronaut is delicious once you get the wrapper off?
Don’t go. I want to look back in time and speak to young Doctor Naish, or young Gary Rendell. Don’t go into space, I’d tell him; don’t send me into space, I’d tell her. There are plenty of others who want the honour. Don’t send this bright young thing from Stevenage, please. So much could be avoided.
The best way not to get mired in same-man/same-river paradoxes is not to cross the river the first time.
And then, with the buzzing of the minds now painfully clear in mine, I lounge round the corner and discover that this is the mother lode. This is the entrance/exit, the eye of the Frog God that we so recklessly stared into. I look out and see the stars, and maybe one of them’s the Sun.
There is a particular awe in coming across an exit from the Crypts. It’s a rare thing – I’ve done it maybe a half-dozen times in all my wanderings. Mostly there are just stars, the Frog God leering at a distant sun from some remote part of its solar system. Twice there was a planet hanging there, close enough that the locals would have marked the Frog God with their early telescopes, if they ever invented them. On one of those worlds I saw long strands of light across the almost sea-less surface; not the busy clusters of cities, just long strands that might have been the work of hands or some colossal natural show. There were moving lights in orbit too, though, darting between shadows that might have been dockyards, or space stations, or captured asteroids. The other world looked dead, mottled grey, hanging in the firmament like a spent bullet. Probably it had always been that way, but I couldn’t shake the thought that the Crypts sought out intelligences that might appreciate them and come walk their ways. So perhaps there had been life on that grey world, and perhaps there had been rival Frog God sects or a war over who might control the goggling visage that dominated their night sky. Perhaps they went where we so nearly went, desperate that the other guy shouldn’t get the prize.
There’s no planet now, of course. The Frog God’s out past Pluto, always has been, always will be. The starscape isn’t empty, though. The Red Rocket is there. It’s still incomplete; in fact it’s less complete than before, still in the early stages of construction. There’s no sign of the Quixote, but then I wasn’t expecting it. Looks like Naish landed quite a proportion of the ship’s compliment at the brink of the Crypts, though, so either there was a skeleton crew left on the old girl or something bad happened to her and this was all they could save. I decide on the latter. After all, they’re determinedly building the Red Rocket rather than waiting for the Quixote to reappear. And then I realise the cruellest twist of fate in all of this. Why did Magda Proshkin have the fatal luck to cross my bloody path? If not for that ill chance, then she might have built the thing herself and fulfilled her own prophecies.
You seem bemused, Toto. Surely you understand that if something plays hob with space and gravity like the Crypts do, then they must necessarily play the same games with other dimensions? We thought the Artefact was as old as the universe, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to twist time about it until it can be seen and reached from forever and now, all at the same time. And I know there must be a way of going in and out without ending up your own grandfather or past the heat death of the cosmos, because I’ve seen plenty of aliens using this place as their personal galactic shortcut. And if their destination is astray from their home timeframe by a few hundred million years, why, that doesn’t matter a bit! Because time doesn’t care, time is relative and personal, which is how I can have been wandering in these bloody Crypts so long and still make it here.
And who knows, maybe some of them’ll survive to finish the Red Rocket in the end. Just because we found it derelict and incomplete doesn’t mean it can’t also be complete later, or earlier. Let them finish it and blast off for Earth even if it’s not the Earth they want to find. What if they do end up in 5th-century Scandinavia or something? At least everyone has a working knowledge of Danish to help them tell stories to the locals.
But I don’t think they’ll survive that long. I have a feeling that a former colleague is going to dine on their bones tonight.
There is a chamber cut from the stone here, just behind the Frog God’s eye. It’s neater than the caves of the Pyramid People, but I know it’s man-made. Naish has played it safe and made her base in sight of the stars, in case they go anywhere. I see maybe a dozen people, some sleeping, some upright, all suited, but most without helmets. They see me.
I recognise Doctor Naish. I should probably feel an additional stab of ire at her pasty Scottish face. She’s the one who got me into this nonsense in the first place, after all. Why couldn’t she have gone to study Mercury or something, and left gravitational anomalies well alone? I don’t hate her, though. She’s the person left here who I knew longer than anyone else, back from before the mission, before training, back when I did odd jobs for the Madrid branch of the ESA. I feel almost fond of her, an old friend. We should catch up, chew the fat.
Just let me see everyone else off first.
There’s a little gunfire, but I shake it off irritably. Nobody’s much keen to go toe-to-toe with me now, not since Li and Diaz got theirs. Naish is shouting, though. It sounds as though she’s calling in the cavalry, so I guess another salvage team’s in earshot. The more the merrier. Let’s make this a proper farewell party. Everyone’s invited.
Except what comes out of a tunnel at the far end of the chamber isn’t just another goblin, it’s an ogre, head and shoulders above these mewling little chitterers, these stunted runts, these humans. I roll my shoulders, standing tall for once thanks to the space Doctor Naish has cut for me. Across the room is a metal sha
pe with bandy legs and big, curving arms, four blank lenses for eyes and a row of chattering cogs for teeth.
I almost feel relief. I thought that scrap we had was meaningless, the clue of the food bar wrapper a mystery I’d never unravel, but here it is, the Iron Hunchback itself. It hands something off to one of my former compatriots, a device that looks unfamiliar and half-complete. Has it been trading with them, helping them? Is it a true Crypt-traveller, wise to all the paths and the tricks the place plays with time? Or perhaps just another lost exile seeking common cause? It lurches forward swiftly enough, though, joyous for the battle, the goblins running to hide beyond it. I see some dents in its armour that I gave it, and no doubt it remembers the pounding it gave me.
It tries its energy weapon first. Now, you can’t dodge lasers, no matter what the sci-fi films say. You can’t dodge them, because they move at the speed of light, and if you see them coming then you’ve already taken one through the eye. You can fake them out, though. I saw the direction its big arm was pointing in, and ran forward in an erratic zigzag, feeling the fire of it warm my hide but nothing more.
The others, Naish, Ostrom, they’re all cowering in its shadow. My people, fellow humans of Earth, and they’re hiding behind the Iron Hunchback like it’s going to save them. I’m going to rip off that dome and use its body as a dustbin. How dare it stand between me and my repatriation? I will not be denied my rightful prey.
The anger rises so hot in me that I forget the next dodge and take a charcoal weal across my shoulder. The pain only fortifies me. I will bloody have this alien tosser. ‘Iron Hunchback’ is giving the bastard way too much dignity.
“Eat it, you git!” I howl and then I’m on it, leaping forward and clinging to its shell with fingers and toes as I try to pry it open.
Walking to Aldebaran Page 10
